“Power is a kind of love, and love is a kind of power.” — Harriet Rubin

1. The phrase ‘raw feminine power’ surfaced in my thoughts today. I like it, and not just because it makes me think, for whatever reason, of rock sugar crystals, or raw diamonds (responsibly sourced, of course).

2. I’ve been thinking about power in an off-and-on kind of way ever since my therapist told me several years ago that I have an “ambivalent relationship” with power: I was fascinated by it even as I shied away from “claiming” my own. I thought she was making a particular observation about me – what I didn’t realize is how that same statement could be true, in a sweeping generalization kind of way, about women in general. (Gloria Feldt writes deeply about this in her great book NO EXCUSES: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power and teaches the 9 “power tools” in her course on women’s leadership which you can find here. I took the course and can vouch that it is awesome.)

3. I once tweeted a link to a blog post of mine called something like how to be a powerful woman. It got hardly any hits. I tried again, replacing ‘powerful woman’ with ‘female badass’ and the hits went through the roof. (This was, keep in mind, before the word ‘badass’ became so horribly overused.)

As Gloria Feldt discusses in her book, many women don’t like the word power. Feel uncomfortable around it. And yet: we want autonomy, we want to create impact, we want to change the world, we want to self-actualize.

We want to be badasses.

How can any of that happen if we don’t have the power?

And how can we have power if we don’t name it and claim it? click here

“Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool.”

— movie quote from TRUE ROMANCE (Quentin Tarantino)

The first time I ever went to a black-tie event in LA, I was blown away by how beautiful the women were.

There was so much female beauty, it started to blur together. That was the second thing I noticed: the women kind of looked alike (at least to a visitor from the Bay Area, where the glam factor is not so prominent and plastic surgery not quite so de rigueur). It was as if they were all vaguely related.

In that sea of snug designer dresses and perfect cleavage, one woman stood out. Bobbed black hair, a long skirt, boots, turquoise jewelry. She made it all work in a way that would be difficult to copy – it wasn’t a look lifted from a magazine or taken off a storefront mannequin or dictated by a stylist. It was uniquely her, matched to her body type and telling a story of personality unlike anything else in that room.

It was, I realize now, my first real lesson in the art of differentiation: how to set yourself apart, how to get noticed in the crowd (and the crowded marketplace).

You can fit yourself into the same category as everyone else.

Or you can strike out in a direction based on your own instincts, knowledge and self-knowledge – and how you choose to apply that knowledge.

This is otherwise known as your voice. Your creative DNA. Your artistic signature.

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

― Joseph Campbell

You have an inner source code – a soulcode — that holds the secret to where you belong in the world.

You unlock that secret slowly, over years, on a passion quest.

The quest is necessary because it makes you into what you need to be.

Your place of belonging, your golden niche, is defined by your ruling passion: the thing you do in the way that only you can do it, that puts you in flow, evoking your highest and most creative self in service to something larger than yourself.

A ruling passion is twofold: your purpose, and the method by which that purpose is delivered into the world.

Your purpose is timeless and unchanging.

The way you choose to express that purpose depends on your time and place, and it evolves as you evolve (or transforms into a different expression altogether).

Your purpose is often connected to an inner wound of some kind. Those places of hurt and shame can be valuable clues to who you are and what you’re meant to do. click here

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

— Anais Nin

For so long, creative achievement – to make something out of nothing, to shape meaning out of raw experience, to impose your soulprint on the world — was the province of men.

‘Woman artist’ was an oxymoron: such a person was not a real artist (a lady artist, a dilettante) or not a real woman. To be a creator is to be the one who looks and invents instead of being looked at or invented, who chooses instead of being chosen.

A female creator is by definition a rebel, and a rebel is a dangerous woman.

She’s dangerous because her full-blooded, authentic spirit and its insistence on expressing itself through her chosen medium cuts against what it means to be traditionally feminine. To be feminine, as our culture would have it, is to be quiet, inoffensive, self-sacrificing, restrained, pretty, pleasing and nice.

It is to discount your inner truth when it threatens to be even remotely disruptive, as truth tends to be; it is to listen, nod and smile; it is to be weaker and lesser; it is to strive for a level of perfection that isn’t so perfect it might intimidate other people, especially men; it is to split off the stormy emotions and tamp them down deep where they can’t hurt anybody – except maybe yourself. click here

Because Mother Teresa knew where her edges were, she could go right up to them. She always knew when to draw back. She gave her love, her time, and her energy without giving away herself. She knew that you can’t give what you don’t have, so it was important to keep the reserve of her self filled up.

Healthy boundaries.

Structure gives shape to things. Structure creates a sense of identity. Mother Teresa knew who she was, and because of that self-knowledge she knew how to plug into the world: how to carry out the work of her soul. click here

To speak of wilderness is to speak of
wholeness. Human beings came out of that
wholeness.

— Gary Snyder

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense any more.

He showed me a red drawstring pouch. It held a Crunchie, a Maltesers, and four or five Flakes.

I said, “Those are my exact specific favorites.”

I grew up in Canada, where you can get them at any convenience store. In the US, you have to make a little more effort. I will drive out of my way to a gas station in Beverly Hills for its rows on rows of imported candy, where I will buy my fix and leave without remembering to actually put gas in the car.

(When I do remember to put gas in the car, I then have to remember to take my Starbucks or my wallet off the roof of the car, which is where I tend to put things while I’m fueling up, before driving away.)

No one in my house seemed to know about the bars or how they got there. Everybody agreed it was a sweet, thoughtful gesture, and then reminded each other to lock all doors and windows in case I had a stalker. click here

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

— David Whyte

At one point last fall, someone I loved was in emotional crisis. I drove to see him, both hands gripping the wheel, the freeway unfurling in front of me. It was as if the excess stuff in my life burned off layer by layer, leaving nothing but crystalline core: the sense of what truly mattered.

In that moment I knew who I was, I knew my purpose. That drive jolted me into being. I was focused and present. I was alive.

The crisis passed.

Things gradually became okay again.

I haven’t had that experience of diamond-edged clarity since, but it left a taste and texture in my brain. Life holds every one of us to a final accounting, and when that moment comes I will know if I lived fully and well: if I loved, if I contributed, if I was wise and savvy enough to recognize the beauty of the moment, and then to let it go; if I handled pain with dignity and transformed my wounds to light.

I can only imagine – except I don’t want to imagine – Elliot Rodger’s final thoughts, the life he was forced to account for just before he ended it. click here

“I think confidence is the way we meet our circumstances, whether they are wondrous and wonderful or really hard and difficult…It’s almost like a wholeheartedness, where we’re not holding back. We’re not fragmented. We’re not divided. We’re just going towards what’s happening. There’s an energy to it. I think that’s confidence. And it’s absolutely part of human fulfillment.” — Sharon Salzberg

Last night a close girlfriend and I went out to a little gallery on Melrose that was holding a fundraiser for Sandra Fluke in her run for state Senate.

Two young women – one of them Thora Birch of AMERICAN BEAUTY fame – gave speeches, intelligent, impassioned, thoughtful, informed speeches, and I thought again of this hunger that is out there for female role models who are not celebrated first and foremost for their hotness (or criticized for a supposed lack of).

The same friend and I had gone to hear Sandra speak at another event about a year ago. During the q + a someone asked how she felt about the vicious verbal attacks Rush Limbaugh and his ilk aimed at her when she spoke to the need for insurance companies to cover birth control.

Sandra expressed her relief that this particular spotlight had fallen on someone like her — with such a straight-arrow past that she literally had nothing to hide from the private investigators the Republicans hired to shame and discredit her — instead of someone who could truly get damaged. (“You,” one investigator told her, or something to this effect, “are one of the most boring people on the planet.” He meant it as a good thing.)

I liked this answer because it showed how Sandra recognized the impersonal nature of these very personal attacks. They weren’t going after her so much as what she stood for: the idea, or set of ideas, that she embodies.

She knows that those ideas are worth championing.

She is hooked into something bigger than herself.

I thought of Sandra when I went to hear Hillary Clinton speak at UCLA a few months ago. When her interviewer asked what Hillary’s advice would be to all the young people in the audience who want to change the world, Hillary spoke of the need for young women in particular to grow a very thick skin. When you try to change the status quo, she said, you will get criticized, sometimes even verbally attacked, by people whose primary goal is to make you sit down and shut up. (For women, these attacks still tend to circle in on appearance and sexuality.)

Male or female, though – unless we’re narcissistic or sociopathic – we generally want people to think well of us. It’s easy to say you shouldn’t care what they think, but it’s harder to actually do that when the part of the brain that registers a social slight is the same part that registers a physical blow. We are social animals, and once upon a time isolation from the herd meant probable death. To lose approval in the eyes of others can be, to our ancient brain, as much of a survival threat as something crouching in the bushes to eat us. click here

They assert their opinions. They’re not afraid to interrupt (although hopefully they are not obnoxious blowhards). If they’re sitting down, they’ll steeple their fingers or put their hands behind their head. They are not overly expressive; they are calm, even stoic. They do not engage in constant approval-seeking behavior (excessive smiling, constant nodding, head tilting, flirting).

In other words, confident body language is coded as masculine.

A few posts ago, I referred to ‘the badass feminine’ and people have asked me what I meant by that. I honestly don’t believe that feminine badass has to be an oxymoron. The fact that our culture interprets ‘feminine’ as weak and submissive creates this belief that women have to become imitation men in order to be powerful.

I suspect it’s because of a confusion of sex and gender and body language, as if submissive body language is innately feminine and strong confident body language is innately masculine. Men and women both can find themselves in positions of power or powerlessness — and their body language changes accordingly. Women who act one way in front of other women might show up completely differently in a room filled with men (and vice versa).

As many women will be quick to tell you, a lot of so-called traditional ‘femininity’ is a performance, just like a lot of ‘natural beauty’ relies on fillers, makeup, style, personal trainers, strict dieting, expensive skincare, teeth bleaching, laser hair removal, good lighting – and I haven’t even touched on plastic surgery yet. Behavior that is aimed to please, placate, manipulate and soothe can be just as learned as putting on a pair of fake eyelashes.

Maybe women are biologically wired to nurture relationships and keep the peace – or maybe women have been acting the way people act when their survival depends upon the whims, moods, decisions and general approval of those who have more physical, social and/or economic power than they do. click here

“All good work should have an edge of life and death to it. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.”

One of the best pieces of creative advice I ever got was in relation to the question of why you start a project at all, especially something as time-intensive and soul-consuming as a novel. “Will writing this book change your life?” the teacher asked me. “If the answer is no, then that’s not your real baby.”

Note that he was referring to the process, not the end product. He didn’t mean change-your-life in the way of accolades and Oprah and movie rights (although that wouldn’t suck). He meant what David meant: it should have an edge of life and death.

Which sounds dramatic, but here, the death is symbolic. (One hopes.)

I once had a dream in which I was beheaded – too many episodes of THE TUDORS – and as the blade went painlessly through my neck I felt myself leap into a different state of being. It’s the only dream I can remember that had me die, but the message seemed clear: I was entering a time of transformation. I would throw off one life, one identity, and be reborn into another.

The creative process changes you. Even as you’re making the thing, the thing is making – or remaking – you, and not just because click here